Lessons - Why We Need God | Sam Adeyemi - Global Speaker & Strategic Leadership Expert

In this Lessons episode, discover how practical spirituality and leadership principles can transform lives and communities. Learn actionable strategies to address challenges like poverty, cultivate entrepreneurship, and develop leadership skills rooted in timeless wisdom. Whether you're building a business or striving to make a difference, this episode offers insights to elevate your journey. Talk to me about your journey. Talk to me about you at one point in your life found God. I don't think from what I understand God was always as prominent in your life. I mean, your father was an engineer. It's not like you came from a family of people that were involved in the church of the degree that you are. So how did you find God? How did you decide to be this person in this life? Right. Thank you. So I was born basically into a Christian family. We went to church. But as far as having a personal relationship was concerned about didn't come in until I went into college. Amazingly, one of my uncles had just become a born again Christian. He was a college student and he was like on fire for blood. And the first thing he wanted to do was to lead everybody in the family to Christ, especially as young people. So the day my dad took me to college, you know, to resume. He came along. And then at my hostel, he saw all the various groups and clubs in my college. They had good of science, inviting young students to gender. Then he said to me, you see, all those, all those, but don't join them. This one for the Christian union. That's the one you should join. Okay. I said, thank you. Thank you, uncle. In my mind, I was thinking, you just go away. I want to enjoy my life. Okay. This is the first time I'm having freedom away from home. And I want to do what young people do. But amazingly, somebody came, a preacher came on our campus. And this was like two months after three months after I resumed college. Did the big crusade was preaching. And then I just decided to have a change of mind, interestingly, and give my life to Christ, you know, accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior. And it was an interesting change for me because I actually experienced the influence of God in my life. I'll tell you one significant part to it. Whenever I never done to pray in school, it would be like somebody pressed play on a video play cassette. Now, I mean, this was a long time ago. Like this was like 40 years ago. Okay. I was a teacher. So you look, by the way, just a point, you look incredibly good for that being 40 years ago. So whatever you're doing, I want some advice. Good for you. Thank you, Scott. So I would see myself standing before people to speak, you know, and to teach. Now, that was very remarkable for me because I am introverted. I used to be extremely shy. You know, I found it because to look into the eyes of just one person. So to even imagine me standing in front of a crowd to speak was completely out of it. And these thoughts only came when I had prayed. So that made me know this had to be the spirit of God influencing my mind. This had to be God's design for me. Okay. So yes, I was studying to be a civil engineer, but it looks like there's another part of my life. I didn't know was that. Okay. And three within a short while, I was elected into positions, you know, in my fellowship in school. That's why the leadership things started before I was up of college. I was leading the whole fellowship, you know, in my college. And then when I got out in Nigeria, you have this one year mandatory service to the nation. Every college graduate goes through it, except you are over 30. So happened for each state, the people in the service, they choose someone to head the whole Christian group for a whole state. I was choosing to lead the Christian group for my whole state, which was very surprising for me again, because also why I didn't know anybody saw me, right. Because you were elected to do that, you couldn't do anything else. That was what you did full time for the one yet. So, so that's that's how I bought into this line. The beautiful part to it, like I said, is it's been something really, really practical for me, because I was able to discover my talents. Okay. I was able to take my attention of myself, because I was what made me struggle at the beginning, because things were hard. Like I said, for my family, I was desperate to succeed. And to succeed meant to have a good job, to have money, to have cash direct, to have a good house and all that, and be able to travel the world. But you know, somewhere along the line, an elderly person, a minister at our church looked at me and said, I want you to read the book. There's something about you. And he gave me the first book I read on leadership. Christian leadership by Donald S. Oldman. Now, for the fact that this was over 30 years ago, and the book was already old then. You can imagine how old the book is, but it was the first book I was reading on leadership. And he learned me the book. So I took a notebook, a small jotta. And I wrote down all the major points in the book. I'll tell you again an inflection point I had written the book. The author said, those old ideas that suggest that a few people are born to lead everybody else is born to follow. He said those ideas are dead. He said they were pushed by Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Yep. He said, but if you read your Bible and you see that God created money in his own image and told him to have dominion. You would know therefore that every human being has the capacity to leak. Then he listed the auto listed the qualities of a leader and said, whoever you are, look at the list. You have some of the qualities already. The ones you don't have, you can cultivate. Honestly, he was speaking to me for the first time I accepted the fact that I agreed. I began to consciously develop the qualities of a leader and Scott says then, wherever I have been, I've literally just floated to the top. I've been able to develop my capacity to influence people for good. So I came to the conclusion that at the highest level of success, you help other people to succeed. That's also made me big on leadership. I think that it's interesting. There's various types of work that's done that are not in the business sense. I even spoke about this before we started. So spiritual leadership. I think even some sports leaders, some coaches, some military leaders and some military admirals and captains and whatnot. There's so much wisdom in some of the things that people do in a day to day that isn't just from running a business that can be so applicable to, if you want, run a business, but also it could be for just being a leader in your own community and your own life. I think that's what you really tapped into. I think that's actually why your message resonates with so many people. I mean, so you built out a day star Christian center. And now I think you serve the millions of individuals. And you teach them on spirituality and God and the Bible and all the things that are normally tied to religion. But then I think there's a lot of leadership principles because that's where a lot of your work lies, too. There's a lot of lessons that you teach over that are, yes, they're rooted in biblical lessons and wisdom. But also they pass over leadership lessons to like elevate the human and the human spirit. I love that. Thank you. I mean, I don't know. Maybe it's my background and the sciences, but I just have this passion, you know, for giving people information that they can apply to dead. To dead, to dead, to dead living. So even in my leading a church, I made up my mind that I was going to teach what was relevant. So one of the things we did that revolutionized our ministry in daytime was that we asked what are people's needs. We actually looked at the demographic of the people living five miles radius of our church. What's the age distribution. What are their needs. Now this, this was Africa, this was Lagos Nigerian and poverty came pops. So we said, okay, wait, how have we been addressing the poverty program. This was three years after our church started. And the only thing we had done was, I mean, we looked at my preaching and all I had been teaching was how people should give to the work of God. I then said, well, wait, we shouldn't be starting from there. People need to have the money before they can give it. Is there anything in the Bible we can teach them that will help them to get the money. I actually prayed about it. And then when searching in the Bible, and I was amazed, I was amazed at how much is in the Bible about finances. And I saw entrepreneurship. In fact, I saw that some of the most prominent figures in the Bible were entrepreneurs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, even Christ himself was a businessman of the age of 30 when he started his ministry fully and I thought, what? Most of his disciples Christ got from the business world, the fishermen were business people. And so it was like, I looked at all the parables of Christ, the parables of talents and so on. Then I just went, I just, I mean, I exploded literally. I was teaching practical things from the Bible. Now that surprised people a lot. After some time, I zeroed in on entrepreneurship. So by then, because we were meeting practical needs, our church was literally exploded, right? We went from running one service to running for services in 10 months, because we were just coming, right? 30 minutes into the service outside was full. There was a long line outside of people wanting to come in for the next service. Eventually, we were running five services on Sunday morning, right? So the first service, I was teaching entrepreneurship. How to start around a business from the Bible. And then later, I then zeroed in on the leadership issue. So I started a leadership school. We call it the Daystack Leadership Academy. We graduated over 45,000 people from the leadership school now. And we teach what you would get from the average business school. The only difference is we also have biblical stories to support the things we're teaching, but the principles are the same and they're so powerful, right? Just yesterday, somebody sent me a direct message on LinkedIn and said, I would want an opportunity to talk to you. I want to tell you how my wife and I attended the Daystack Leadership Academy started our business, the big cakes, right? And he said, now we have a hundred people on our stuff. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.